The mertzer Stepke was right—by the evening of the next day Daenek knew the language well enough to read aloud from the poems, while the mertzer sat with eyes closed on his makeshift bed. The sensation, the feel of the words on his tongue, was intoxicating to Daenek. He felt as if he had grown another pair of arms.
Their voices went on for a long time, the words coming faster and more sure from Daenek’s mouth. He even talked for a while about living with the Lady Marche in the house so far above the friendless village. Stepke finally gave in and spoke of some things he remembered about the old thane, a long time ago.
“The rumor was,” said Stepke, “that he had a power, a tremendous power. He could reach into a man’s mind with his own and command him. And the man would obey, as though he were nothing but another hand of the thane’s. I heard that he quelled a riot in the quarters of his militia that way. By just striding into the barracks and looking around, pressing them all under the weight of his power.” The mertzer paused for a moment. “But the thane hated the power, didn’t want his people to be only puppets at his bidding. He wanted them to be fired with his ideas, the hopes that fired him. Some were—but not enough.”
He was silent again, and turned away to gaze out the window.
In his own room, Daenek sat on the edge of his bed, thinking.
Something was growing hard within his chest. Not to be a thane—who could come after a man with a power such as that?
Daenek knew there was nothing inside himself like it—but to wrestle from the devouring past the truth about his father’s death. A son’s obligation.
That night Daenek heard angry sounding voices from the kitchen downstairs. Lying in his bed, he couldn’t make out what the mertzer and the Lady Marche were arguing about. He knew he didn’t want to sneak out to the head of the stairs and listen, either. He turned his head toward the window and watched the cold stars until the voices were smothered by sleep.
The next morning, with the sun forming thick, dust-filled shafts in the little room, Stepke was busy re-assembling his pack.
Daenek stood in the doorway and watched him as he knelt, stacking his books and rolling the blankets into a tight cylinder.
“Where are you going?” said Daenek.
The mertzer did not look up as he began stuffing the items into the leather pack. “A man has to work,” he said. “Cutting stone is as much to my liking as anything else, I suppose.”
“But you could stay here. You don’t have to leave. You could go down to the quarry every day from here.”
The bearded face looked up at Daenek, then turned back to the motions of his hands. “No,” he said quietly. “That’s not possible.”
“I know why,” said Daenek, his voice choked tight with a sudden, overwhelming bitterness.
The mertzer reached out and took Daenek’s elbow in one hand and drew him closer. “No, you don’t,” he said, holding Daenek before himself. “The Lady Marche loves you, but hearts wear down and become fragile, just like all the other machines have. There’s a world of pain and confusion below this one, and it’ll come welling back up like blood soon enough without my being around to remind the poor woman of it. Everything breaks down and ends, eventually.”
Daenek pulled away from his grasp and ran out of the room.
He returned in a few seconds and thrust the book of poems at the mertzer. “Here. This is yours.”
Stepke shook his head. “Keep it.”
All the way through the fields, as Daenek followed the mertzer along the narrow path, neither said a word. The rustling of the yellow stalks under the sun was the only sound, until the house was hidden from view by the curve of the hill. The village lay against the foot of the hill far below, “You’d better go back,” said Stepke.
Another few seconds of silence passed as Daenek glanced at the man’s face, then across the bending fields. “Why do things ran down?” he said finally. The question had been moving slowly through him since the mertzer had spoken of the Lady Marche.
“And people? Why can’t they stay the same, instead of everything falling apart?”
“Maybe,” said the mertzer softly, “the sociologists would know for sure. But—” He paused and ran his blunt fingers through his beard. “I heard, a long time ago, about something called the Dark Seed.”
Daenek sensed the other’s reluctance to begin the long walk, alone, down the hillside to the village. He waited for him to speak again.
Abstracted, the mertzer’s gaze wandered over the fields. “Back when I lived in the Capitol, before I signed on the caravans, I heard about how the seed-ships came all the way here from old Earth—do you know about that? Do they ever talk about it in these parts?”
Daenek nodded. “A little.”
“And when the ships came,” continued Stepke slowly, pulling on his beard, “there weren’t people aboard. No, just the priests, that were made on Earth to pilot the ships and take care of the cargo. The cargo was machinery, so delicate and precise that it had to be shielded from any slow leakage of radiation, and one small box less than a meter wide. The priests took the box from the little niche it had been crammed into in one of the closely packed ships. Inside the box was human genetic material—the cellular blueprints for an entire population to be started on this world. The priests took the fertilized ova, fed it into their precious machinery, and began cloning—do you know what that is?”
His forehead furrowed with concentration, Daenek shook his head.
“Cloning is a way of making many individuals from the same ovum, the same genetic material. You see, the seedships only had enough room to bring a tiny fraction of the human gene pool from Earth. So, to make the first generation here on the world large enough to be socially viable, each ovum was cloned to produce dozens of identical individuals. Then the genes from Earth were reshuffled with each succeeding generation, as the individuals married and had children at random. So many generations have passed since the first that no one’s exactly the same as anyone else now—but there was only so much genetic material to begin with. We’re all only different combinations of it.”
Daenek had followed most of what the mertzer had said. He recognized the concepts from an elementary science text that was one of the books, written in the stone-cutters’ language, kept in the house. The Lady Marche had found them in the marketplace, the remnants of a school for the village children, abandoned long ago. “But what’s the Dark Seed?” said Daenek.
“Ah, that.” The mertzer bent his head and frowned at the path’s dust. “Things have been slowly running down for a long time—not just machines, but the people as well. Becoming cruder and lazier, wretched and fearful of any change or effort. Some writers of books in the Capitol talked about a Dark Seed, an entropic gene that had slipped by the eugenicists on Earth who were supposed to weed out every undesirable characteristic from the ova put aboard the seed-ships. Or else some radiation from somewhere between the stars managed to pierce the shielding and altered one gene for the worse. The Dark Seed—if it even really exists—creates that part of us that gives up, that lets things slide into rot and waste, that finds a kind of sullen joy in the end of hopes and ambitions. That’s satisfied with death. Have you ever felt—” The mertzer’s eyes stared fervidly at Daenek. “—how simple, how easy it would be to die? How many problems it would solve? That’s the Dark Seed speaking in your veins.”
Stricken silent, Daenek gazed back into the other’s face. An appalling, sick feeling drifted in his gut, as if the mertzer had laid a finger on his most secret knot of organs. It’s true, he thought, the Dark Seed exists. Eats. I can feel it.
Stepke’s broad shoulders heaved as he sucked a great, ragged breath into his lungs. He looked away from Daenek and again towards the village. “What can be done?” he murmured. “It’s in our very hearts. There’s no knife fine enough . . .” His voice broke off, and after a moment, one of his massive hands squeezed Daenek’s shoulder. “You’ll see me, OK?” he boomed, the cheerfulness in his v
oice forced and artificial. “On the days off at the quarry, I’ll come up here, and we’ll swap books— OK? The one I gave you for one you haven’t read. All right?”
Daenek nodded.
The mertzer pulled his pack higher upon his shoulders and started down the steepest part of the path. “OK?” he called back, when he was well down the hillside. “In a week or so. I’ll be back.”
It was less than that. Three days later, the mertzer returned.
Daenek laid the book down on the surface of the boulder and watched, with a sick, hollow certainty growing in him, three burly stone-cutters struggling up the hillside. They carried a bundle wrapped in a dirty white cloth, awkwardly shaped and heavy—the size of a man.
Daenek followed the group’s progress for a moment, until his eyes ached from the sun’s glare. He slid from atop the rock and slowly started to push his way through the weeds and down to the house.
The white bundle was lying on the house’s doorstep. The stone-cutters, their faces shiny with sweat, tried to conceal their smirking expressions as they stood over it. Framed in the doorway, the Lady Marche waited, her face pale but expressionless. Daenek stood a few yards away at the edge of the field and watched.
“It was an accident,” said one of the men. He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head in a little mockery of a bow. “A little rockslide in the quarry, and him in the way of it . . .”
“And no one bore him any ill will,” the Lady Marche spoke softly, looking down at the shrouded figure.
“He fought us,” said one of the other men, looking sullen. “He shouldn’t have tried to stick around, he should’ve just gone away. But now he got—”
“Shut up,” said the first one who toad spoken. He turned back to the Lady Marche. “It was an accident and you can’t prove otherways.”
She nodded. “You did right to bring him here. Now go away.”
“Here’s his stuff.” One of the men held out the mertzer’s pack, hastily jammed together and tied.
Taking it in both hands, she turned and disappeared into the bouse.
The men stood for a moment, looking at each other and the mute object they had carried up the hill. As they started away from the house and towards the path, one of them caught sight of Daenek, still standing motionless at the edge of the field.
“There’s your friend,” called the stone-cutter. He pointed to the white bundle and smiled. “Someday . . .” He turned and trotted after his companions.
The Lady Marche went down to the village and hired the carpenter to build a narrow box, and, for a little more money, to dig a hole slightly larger in the fields above the house.
Daenek took the mertzer’s pack up to his room and placed it carefully in the center of his bed. He copied the name written on the flyleaves onto a scrap of paper and took it out to the carpenter.
The man shrugged, pocketed another coin, and carved the six letters onto the little board driven into the ground at one end of the hole.
Chapter IV
Around the time he turned fifteen, Daenek began exploring the hill range in earnest. Partly from boredom, but also from a restlessness that seemed to swell up from his loneliness, he wandered farther and farther away from the house and the village. With the food the Lady Marche had prepared tucked in the leather pack that had belonged to Stepke, he tracked over the hills. At night he would lie on his back in the unrolled blankets, and open one of the books he had brought. They had also been the mertzer’s. One of the moons’ light was enough for him to make out the words he had already memorized.
Sometimes the books helped, but at other times he put them away in the pack, and dreamed—almost involuntarily—about meeting a girl in the hills. One from another village, who didn’t recognize him, and was prettier than the laughing, sneering ones in the stone-cutters’ village. There were small noises, of insects and wind-stirred trees, and he’d fall asleep, half-hearing them.
One morning he lifted his head from the ground—a fine mist in the air was gradually thickening into rain. He rolled the blankets and pack together, then set off for home, with the first light of the sun barely piercing the clouds’ grey.
At the foot of the hill he found the broad roadway that the caravans used. If he followed it he would pass between the village and the quarry before he reached the little trail that wound back up through the hills to the house and the Lady Marche. No one will see me, he thought. He had avoided the village almost completely for the last couple of years. His boots pressed into the muddy surface of the road. They’re probably still all asleep.
As he neared the village, though, he began to hear a ragged chorus of shouts. Voices, male and female, tinged with an unusual excited timbre. Something—another voice beneath the others but different, disturbing—made Daenek hesitate before he hurried towards the noise. The skin on his arms tightened from more than just the coldness of the rain.
The villagers, a crowd of a hundred or more, were standing in a mass at the entrance to the quarry. The ones at the back of the crowd were shouting the loudest, dancing on tiptoe and clawing at the others’ shoulders as they strained to see what was happening inside the quarry’s gates. A few glanced quickly at Daenek as he approached, but didn’t recognize him in the obscuring rain. “What’s going on?” he asked the nearest ones.
“It’s the bad priest!” shrilled a hatchet-faced woman. She tugged nervously at the corners of her soaking wet shawl.
“They’ve got him trapped in a corner!”
“The what?” said Daenek.
“Where’ve you been?” growled one man suspiciously. “The damn thing’s murdered two people in the last two nights.”
“Tore out their throats, it did, right in their own beds!” The woman’s eyes rolled giddily at the thought.
Daenek edged away from the crowd. He could see nothing from here. Looking up, he noted a pair of sociologists, the rain falling through their faintly luminous bodies as they floated high over the quarry and pointed their cameras downward. Maybe from above, thought Daenek.
Scrambling up the rocky slope to one side of the quarry’s bottleneck entrance, he came to a flat outcropping where he could see the entire scene inside the quarry, and where he was hidden as well from the other onlookers.
Below him, the bad priest thrashed in the net of ropes that formed its trap. The ropes were wet and glistened like butchered animal sinews. Only a few shreds of the bad priest’s robe still hung on its tubular limbs. Its metal body gleamed under the rain, the jointed arms and legs pulling and twisting at the taut lines.
One of the dozen or so black-uniformed men—the subthane’s personal militia—threw another rope around the bad priest’s neck, then quickly backed away as the thing tried to lunge at him. Its immobile face seemed to take on a lunatic quality, the flat round scan-cells that formed its eyes blazing unnaturally. Its ringers curved and clawed at the air.
One of the quarry-workers, an enormous man with coarse black hair plastered to his forehead by the ram, stepped up to the constellation of men, ropes, and wildly thrashing machine.
The stone-cutter carried a huge pickax cradled in his hands. He and the militia captain conferred for a few seconds, and then the captain gave a signal to the others.
The man pulled tighter on the ropes, pinning the bad priest against the wall of the quarry. Its body arched as it fought against the restraints. The stonecutter stepped between the taloned hands straining to sink into the flesh of the man’s arms.
He swung the pickax and buried its point in the machine’s chest.
A small noise, metal against metal, and then the bad priest’s arms slowly folded and swung towards the ground. The scan-cells went blank. Rain gathered in the cavity and ran in rivulets along the wooden handle of the pickax.
The crowd of villages gathered at the quarry gates was silent now. Daenek watched as they cleared a little pathway among themselves. A group of priests, headed by the local bishop, came slowly through the crowd towards the gate.
“We have come,” it called, its harsh voice loud enough for Daenek to hear, “to take our own back with us.”
One of the subthane’s men opened the gate and the priests filed into the area. They drew the ropes away from the metal body and, last of all, pulled the pickax from their fallen brother’s chest. A new robe was wrapped around the dead machine and they carried it away, disappearing beyond the massed villagers.
Is there a Dark Seed for priests, too? wondered Daenek. Something that loves death? He crouched on the little rock ledge, unconcerned with the rain pelting across his back. He had heard before of priests going bad, suddenly tearing off their robes and becoming frenzied killers of men. There were new stories every year of other villages suffering with one or more of them. The renegade machines’ own ferocity made them incautious, though, and easy to trap, if still dangerous to approach. Does everything have to break down? thought Daenek. Will all priests become murderers someday?
After a few more minutes, Daenek climbed down from the ledge. The villagers had all returned to their own homes. He hoisted the pack higher on his shoulders and started down the road.
Before he came upon the foot of the trail leading to the house, he overtook the group of priests. They ignored him as they trudged slowly through the mud, heading for their monastery a long ways off in the hills. He stepped into the middle of the silent procession and walked close to the ones carrying the body of the bad priest. A few feet away, the old bishop walked, the point of its staff dragging unnoticed on the wet ground.
“There is no time,” said the bishop suddenly. It halted and turned around, transfixing Daenek with its expressionless gaze. “Or there has been too much of it.”
“Sir?” said Daenek. He had never talked much with priests, having only seen them in the village.
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